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Smut, Refreshed for a New Generation

Joe Rubin, above, rummages through unsorted material at Vinegar Syndrome, a Connecticut company that restores and releases classic X-rated movies.Credit
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Between a detention center and a post office here, there’s a large, unremarkable building on a corner. Other than a few parked cars near a loading dock, there’s not much life outside its off-white walls. But walk through the rickety front door and up the concrete stairs, and what’s inside makes the old Times Square look like Mayberry: thousands of boxes filled to overflowing with sexually explicit films and artifacts.

Welcome to the home of Vinegar Syndrome, founded in 2012 by Joe Rubin and Ryan Emerson to catalog, restore and help release old X-rated films for the home video and theatrical markets. (“Vinegar syndrome” refers to what film smells like when it starts to decay.) The company, which takes up only about a third of the 47,000-square-foot building, plans to introduce a new generation to lost and forgotten films from what’s considered the golden age of American hard-core filmmaking, roughly 1969 to 1986.

“Yes, the films are X-rated,” Mr. Emerson said. “But many of them are interesting and fascinating once you get into them. These films are time capsules.”

The market for this material is small, but among collectors, there is a “fierce competition and a strong desire to own, preserve and reclaim erotic history,” said Mark Rotenberg, who collects and sells pornographic material. Demand is strong for ephemera like posters and photographs. The Chisholm Larsson Gallery in Chelsea sells a few such posters a month, with an average price of about $250, said Robert Chisholm, an owner.

Vintage pornography is also having a moment at repertory movie theaters and mainstream museums. An exhibition now at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan is devoted to the actress Linda Lovelace, who starred in the 1972 film “Deep Throat.” Closing Sunday, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is the first American museum show to feature the homoerotic works of the illustrator Touko Laaksonen, a.k.a. Tom of Finland (1920-91), and the photographer Bob Mizer (1922-92). Last year, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco hosted “X: The History of a Film Rating,” a film series that included showings of “Last Tango in Paris” and “Midnight Cowboy.”

In New York, several adventurous film programmers — many too young to remember the region’s “adult film” past — are teaming with Vinegar Syndrome to present X-rated releases on the big screen. Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn is partnering with the company on a yearlong series, Nitehawk Naughties, devoted to restorations of films from the ’70s, including “The Opening of Misty Beethoven,” which will be shown on Jan. 31. The CineKink festival, which focuses on sex-related cinema, showed “Misty Beethoven” last year, and hopes to feature one of Vinegar Syndrome’s restored releases at its next festival in February, said Lisa Vandever, CineKink’s director.

In March, Anthology Film Archives, the Manhattan center that focuses on experimental and avant-garde projects, will continue its “In the Flesh” series of hard-core X-rated films from Vinegar Syndrome and Distribpix, a distributor of X-rated movies that through the 1980s actually produced films. All of the titles will be shown on 35 millimeter, as they were originally. Together, they reflect the era of what Anthology is calling “porn chic,” which started in the early ’70s when hard-core sex met high production values.

“In the ’70s, adult films were made on 16 or 35 millimeter, and were projected to an audience,” said Casey Scott, who programs this Anthology series. “They were reviewed by Variety and The New York Times.” That era, when films were made under threat of legal action, ended in the early ’80s, when home video brought pornography into living rooms.

Larry Revene, who was the cinematographer of “Corruption,” a 1983 film that will be part of the coming Anthology series, and whose film “Wanda Whips Wall Street” (1982) was shown there last year, said he was glad his work is resurfacing for a new audience. But he cautioned younger fans not to gloss over the darker side of the pornography industry, especially for women.

“For every big-budget film shot over weeks, there were smaller films made in motel rooms with hookers or women who hated it,” he said. “Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s classic.”

Photo

Joe Rubin with film canisters at Vinegar Syndrome, a company that distributes X-rated films.Credit
Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

The actual conservation of these vintage movies remains a challenge. Old film stock is fragile, and mainstream archives won’t touch what might be considered controversial material. That’s where Vinegar Syndrome wants to step in. Over the next year, the company plans to restore and release some 40 DVDs, about two-thirds of which will be vintage X-rated films. So far, the company has acquired more than 1,000 X-rated features and over 5,000 industrial, educational and other types of forgotten films — from many sources, including rights holders, estate sales, shuttered theaters and auctions. Still to come, Mr. Rubin said, are “lost sexploitation films and some popular ’80s slashers.”

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“To my 10-year-old mind, they were entertaining B movies,” Mr. Rubin, now 24, said. “I would fast-forward through the sex to get to the plot, which is counterintuitive. But I was 10, so sex wasn’t on my brain yet.”

Later this year, Mr. Rubin said, Vinegar Syndrome and Distribpix plan to enter the digital streaming market with Skiniflix, a monthly subscription-based online portal, a kind of Netflix for older X-rated films but geared toward cinephiles.

“The focus will be feature films produced in the ’60s through the ’80s, and it will be a respectful and curated site,” said Mr. Rubin.

What Vinegar Syndrome is not, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Emerson both emphasized, is part of the pornography industry. When evaluating titles to restore, Mr. Rubin said, the films must “provide value,” not titillation. “We’re preservationists,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2014, on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: Smut, Refreshed for a New Generation. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe